Before, I would have to zip up the web files, download them, upload them, and then unizp. Now I can accomplish all that with just this simple command.

rsync -avzh –rsh=’ssh -p1234′ user@old_server.solitechgmbh.com:/var/www/ /var/www/

you can also use –stats –progress to get some visual feedback

I also use this just for regular offline backups of the server and it works great!

These platforms have huge communities behind them, they are robust, and they are more importantly community tested. Any custom piece of software is prone to bugs and will break when faced with unforeseen circumstances. These platforms have been around for a while and have been through pretty much everything the web can throw at them. They are sill not perfect but pretty close and getting closer each day.

They have sophisticated admin interfaces and are for the most part fairly easy to customize. Since the pieces are mostly all there, you can see great results with very little spent. Even better, there are companies specializing in customization of these frameworks so you get good quality and good prices. You will also save in the long run since the framework lets you make edits easily often without requiring to know programming. This will also make your site more easily updatable and more attractive to search engines.

I have had very pleased customers with either WordPress or Zen cart. As the name implies, WordPress is a publishing interface used by blogs and ZenCart is an online store software but do not box them in just yet. The beauty of these frameworks is their flexibility. You can use WordPress to create a regular static website or you can make everything completely dynamic and content driven. You can also start static and add features such as Facebook integration as you go later. Same goes for the ZenCart software. You can start with an average shopping cart and add regular website content as you go.

There are lots of other benefits that I won’t go into detail about right now such as one click SEO optimization, automatically updating plugins, twitter module, facebook module, one click install of thousands of extensions and much much more. Each one of these probably deserves their own article.

To demonstrate the power of these platforms, I will be adding some case studies of some clients in the future so you can see what just a few hours of work can do. Stay tuned!

To use it, create a file called random_helper.php in app/controllers/components and copy the following code.

<?php
class RandomHelperComponent extends Object {
 
/**
 * Random string generator function
 *
 * This function will randomly generate a password from a given set of characters
 *
 * @param int = 8, length of the password you want to generate
 * @param string = 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz all possible values
 * @return string, the password
 */     
	function generateRandomString ($length = 8, $possible = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz') {
		// initialize variables
		$password = "";
		$i = 0;
 
		// add random characters to $password until $length is reached
		while ($i < $length) {
			// pick a random character from the possible ones
			$char = substr($possible, mt_rand(0, strlen($possible)-1), 1);
 
			// we don't want this character if it's already in the password
			if (!strstr($password, $char)) { 
				$password .= $char;
				$i++;
			}
		}
		return $password;
	}
}
?>

make sure you include it in the appcontroller as such

var $components = array('Auth','Email','RandomHelper');

then you can call it as follows in any function

$password= $this->RandomHelper->generateRandomString(4,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz');

Enjoy!

I personally like them because of they offer a nice API and statistics all for free. It is a pretty quick service too. You can generate hundreds of URLs in just a few seconds. All you have to do is register and you get a username and API key which you will need in the following section.

Here is the code … As you can see I only implemented the shorten for now but I will probably add some of the other stuff later. For some reason WP won’t let me post curl_exec( so be sure to remove the extra character.

class bitly {
	/**
	 * A PHP class to utilize the bitly API
	 * through the Bitly API. Handles:
	 * - Shorten
	 *
	 * Requires PHP5, CURL, JSON and a Bitly account http://bit.ly/
	 *
	 * Bitly API documentation: http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation
	 */
 
	protected $appkey;
	protected $login;
	protected $version;
 
	/**
	* Contruct the Bitly Class
	*
    * @param string, your Bitly account key
    * @param string, your Bitly account login
	*/
	public function __construct($login, $appkey, $version='2.0.1') {
		$this->login = $login;
		$this->appkey = $appkey;
		$this->version = $version;
	}
 
	/**
	* Retrieve a shortened URL
	*
    * @param string, url to shorten
    * @param string, version of Bitly to use
	*/
	public function shorten($url) {
		//create the URL
		$api_url = 'http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version='.$this->version.'&longUrl='.urlencode($url).'&format=xml&login='.$this->login.'&apiKey='.$this->appkey;
		//call the API
		$curl = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url);
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		$response = curl_ex_ec($curl);
		curl_close($curl);
 
		//parse the XML response and return the url
		$xml_object = new SimpleXMLElement($response);
		return $xml_object->results->nodeKeyVal->shortUrl;
	}
 
}

If you want to use this in CakePHP … you will want to do something like this.
Put this line before the class … I actually use this in a helper since this is a view level class

App::import('Vendor','Bitly', array("file" => "bitly/bitly.class.php"));

Now you can just invoke it in one of your functions somewhere with two simple calls!

$bitly = new Bitly('username', 'your_API_key_here');
$short_url = $bitly->shorten($long_url);

Simple as that … oh and one more thing. Be sure to have CURL installed else this won’t work.

http://www.rewardchamp.com

Reward Champ offers an easy way for you to turn your social network into a cash network with just a few clicks. You can use your social influence to your advantage and promote products and services that your followers might find useful. They have a large set of social publishing features on all offers so you can reach your friends on all major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, etc. You will be credited for each offer they complete with points you can use for cash payments or gift certificates. By using your social network you can make hundreds of dollars, or even thousands each month and significantly boost to your monthly budget with just a few clicks a day. Making money from home made easy through social networking, and social media marketing.

Registration is free and you also get to compete for a weekly cash drawing on top of all the points you earn already. What do you have to loose?! Try social media marketing.

What good is it you ask? You can use it to pull in information from any RSS feed and do what ever you want with the data. For example I use it to pull the RSS feed from my blog and display links to my latest posts on http://www.rewardchamp.com You can see it on the bottom of the page.

CakePHP makes this way to easy! First you need to download the MagpieRSS files from the link above and then extract to your vendors folder.

You need to put this line at the very top of your controller file you want to use RSS with. Before the class declaration

App::import('Vendor','Snoopy', array("file" => "magpierss/extlib/Snoopy.class.inc"));

Now inside a function you want create a new Snoopy object. I use Snoopy because I’m lazy … MagpieRSS is not constructed as Classes like CakePHP would like it to be … Snoopy is. Snoopy will return XML for you which you can make into an easily usable object with SimpleXMLElement. You can var_dump to see what exactly is in this object. You can figure out what to do from there.

$snoopy = new Snoopy();
$snoopy->fetch('http://www.solitechgmbh.com/your/feed/here');
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($snoopy->results);
return $xml->channel->item;

Something like this will get you the title for example.

echo $item->title;

Happy coding!

I added checking for the thumbnail so its not re generated every time. This will save you some CPU cycles and load time for the users.

You would call it with something like this

$image->resize('image.jpg', 100, 100, true,array('border'=>'0', 'alt'=>'My Image')

1. To use it you should make a folder called /webroot/img/imagecache and make sure it is writable to all.
2. Create a file called /views/helpers/image.php and copy the following code into it.

<?php
class ImageHelper extends Helper {
	var $helpers = array('Html'); 
	var $cacheDir = 'imagecache';
 
	function resize($path, $width, $height, $aspect = true, $htmlAttributes = array(), $return = false) {
		$types = array(1 => "gif", "jpeg", "png", "swf", "psd", "wbmp"); // used to determine image type 
 
		$fullpath = ROOT.DS.APP_DIR.DS.WEBROOT_DIR.DS.$this-&gt;themeWeb.IMAGES_URL;
 
		$url = $fullpath.$path;
 
		if (!($size = getimagesize($url)))
			return; // image doesn't exist
 
		if ($aspect) { // adjust to aspect.
			if (($size[1]/$height) &gt; ($size[0]/$width))  // $size[0]:width, [1]:height, [2]:type
				$width = ceil(($size[0]/$size[1]) * $height);
			else
				$height = ceil($width / ($size[0]/$size[1]));
		}
 
		$relfile = $this-&gt;cacheDir.'/'.$width.'x'.$height.'_'.basename($path); // relative file
		$cachefile = $fullpath.$this-&gt;cacheDir.DS.$width.'x'.$height.'_'.basename($path);  // location on server
 
		if (file_exists($cachefile)) {
		$csize = getimagesize($cachefile);
		$cached = ($csize[0] == $width &amp;&amp; $csize[1] == $height); // image is cached
		if (@filemtime($cachefile) &lt; @filemtime($url)) // check if up to date
			$cached = false;
		} else {
			$cached = false;
		}
 
		if (!$cached) {
			$resize = ($size[0] &gt; $width || $size[1] &gt; $height) || ($size[0] &lt; $width || $size[1] &lt; $height);
		} else {
			$resize = false;
		}
 
		if ($resize) {
			$image = call_user_func('imagecreatefrom'.$types[$size[2]], $url);
			if (function_exists("imagecreatetruecolor") &amp;&amp; ($temp = imagecreatetruecolor ($width, $height))) {
				imagecopyresampled ($temp, $image, 0, 0, 0, 0, $width, $height, $size[0], $size[1]);
			} else {
				$temp = imagecreate ($width, $height);
				imagecopyresized ($temp, $image, 0, 0, 0, 0, $width, $height, $size[0], $size[1]);
			}
				call_user_func("image".$types[$size[2]], $temp, $cachefile);
				imagedestroy ($image);
				imagedestroy ($temp);
		}
		return $this-&gt;output(sprintf($this-&gt;Html-&gt;image($relfile,$htmlAttributes)));
    }
}
?>

You can see it in action at http://www.rewardchamp.com, the rewards box towards the top has the thumbnail images showing.

After a LONG time of searching the web, I have not found an answer so I started to investigate my self.

I started to look at the Email component and didn’t see any changes that should make a difference until I got to the $_newLine variable.

It used to be $_newLine = “\n”; but now it is $_newLine = “\r\n”; which apparently does not get interpreted by Gmail well. I don’t know how other email services behave, I just tested with Gmail.

So to fix this issue you want to add this line when you are assembling an email anywhere before the send call.

$this->Email->_newLine = "\n";

This will over ride the faulty default setting.

Restart you Cable or DSL modem

This is the device your phone cord or cable plugs in

1. unplug the power cord.
2. wait about 10 seconds
3. plug the cord back in
4. wait until all the green lights come back on (about 20 – 30 seconds)

Restart your wireless router

This is the device the modem plugs in and has the antennas.

1. unplug the power cord.
2. wait about 10 seconds
3. plug the cord back in
4. wait until all the green lights come back on (about 20 – 30 seconds)

Restart your network switch or hub

This is a device most of your network cables go in.

1. unplug the power cord.
2. wait about 10 seconds
3. plug the cord back in
4. wait until most the green lights come back on (about 10 seconds)

Reset your computers network connections

Do this section for wireless network computers only

1. open your wireless connection controller and select the network you want to connect to.
2. wait until it connects and shows that you have a good signal strength

Do this section for all computers

1. click start
2. click run
3. enter cmd into the text box

cmd

1. reset the IP address of your computer with the following commands. This might take 20 – 30 seconds.

ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew

1. now check to make sure you got the right settings. You should see something like IP Address 192.168.1.X

ipconfig

1. try to access a computer on the network
2. open internet explorer and see if you can connect to a website

If you can not connect ti the internet, repeat all the steps and try again.

If you still can not connect, call your tech support person and tell them all the steps you took so far.

To use it, make this file app/controllers/components/password_helper.php

You can use it in a controller by adding ‘PasswordHelper’ to the $components array.

You can adjust the $possible set with your desired characters.

Here is the code:

<?php
class PasswordHelperComponent extends Object {
 
/**
 * Password generator function
 *
 * This function will randomly generate a password from a given set of characters
 *
 * @param int = 8, length of the password you want to generate
 * @return string, the password
 */    
    function generatePassword ($length = 8)
    {
        // initialize variables
        $password = "";
        $i = 0;
        $possible = "0123456789bcdfghjkmnpqrstvwxyz"; 
 
        // add random characters to $password until $length is reached
        while ($i < $length) {
            // pick a random character from the possible ones
            $char = substr($possible, mt_rand(0, strlen($possible)-1), 1);
 
            // we don't want this character if it's already in the password
            if (!strstr($password, $char)) { 
                $password .= $char;
                $i++;
            }
        }
        return $password;
    }
}
?>